Thing 20: Social Reading & Book Stuff

I was kind of excited about this "thing"! It has been months of me investing hours each week trying to get SORA up and running. I have spent so many frustrated hours trying to figure out why my elementary students are still seeing books that are in the High School collection. Permission levels have been reset through BOCES and through the high school collection, I have worked closely with Overdrive and my tech dept and finally I think I am at the point where I can roll it out with my students. I approached this assignment excited about actually getting to work with Sora in a positive way. For this "thing" I wanted to work on looking at SORA deeply and building lessons for second and third graders and their teachers, where I could rollout the new app to them and showcase titles, tools, and features that will be of interest to them for their academic and personal reading endeavors. However, I ran into yet more roadblocks.

I started by looking at the titles that I thought our students would love. I wanted to use these titles to draw students in. I decided to take advantage of "Thing 25: Green Screen" fun to promote, which you can learn about in more detail under that post.

Then I began thinking about the features that would be appealing for both teachers and students. I loved the idea of being able to assign a book individually to students. I decided to venture into learning more about how to do that with the hopes of creating a screencast for our teachers so that they could easily do it with their students, but then I ran into two dead ends. One I realized that you can only assign Advantages titles, that for some reason I could no longer see in Marketplace or the Sora App and two I realized that my teachers won't have access to Marketplace so they couldn't assign a title. Yet another roadblock with the new product. I am in touch with BOCES to see how to at least troubleshoot the Advantage issue, but in the meantime, I decided to move past this option.

What to do next... I was not going to let SORA defeat me! On to a new idea. One nice thing I love about SORA is how easy it is to read in your browser. Although I had originally wanted to use SORA with our 3rd and 4th graders, I decided that I might be able to reach and positively impact the 5th and 6th graders. They each have their own laptops and don't typically consider using them to read digital books. I decided that I would build a screencast showing them how to do it and ask the teachers if they would share it with their students during ELA WIN (What I Need) time. This would be a new way for me to reach students without being present and hopefully provide students with a helpful and worthy reading option. In addition to sharing the screencast with the teachers, I also embedded it on the library website.

Thing 14: Bitmoji Fun

I have to admit, I created a Bitmoji a long time ago and hated it so I thought I would attempt this again. I love all the neat things I see people doing with them on social media and to promote different aspects of their programs and I wanted to join in the fun. When reading over the options of things to do, I was super excited to try out GBoard because I thought it would create a more accurate "mini" of me. Boy was I wrong and so disappointed!!! I ended up looking like a guy in most of my minis. It really is a disappointment because I love what you can do with it once you have it created. Oh well... so it was back to the drawing boards for me. I ended up redoing my Bitmoji and was a little more pleased with it. It still isn't perfect but definitely better.

Once I settled on a Bitmoji, I added the Chrome extension. What a "game changer" for me. I love how easy it is to drag, drop and create Bitmoji's right from your toolbar.

After I added the extension, I began exploring the "Creating Comic's with Google Slide Link."  I instantly saw how I could use these slides to market programs. While I had been looking over some of the links on  "Thing 20" I had come across a PDF of "100 Reading Resolutions", so I decided I would promote that by both creating a New's Reading Resolution Challenge and a Bitmoji slide to promote it on the library website. Of course, I couldn't stop there I also created a Google Form for students to sign-up (which I embedded on the library website), where I used the Bitmoji as my header image. I am so excited to launch this new challenge. I will be debuting it through social media on New Year's Day!


It looks like this simple "Bitmoji thing" has turned into a year long project for me. The kids are going to love it and it will be a great way to keep kids motivated throughout 2019. I am still thinking about how I give them monthly rewards that aren't just material things and will also be motivating for them to keep going each month. I am notorious for having fun lunch groups as rewards, but that will be really hard to do across 7 grade levels with different lunch times. I am taking suggestions if anyone has a good idea.




Before I sign-off, I went back through "Thing 20" and found the "100 Reading Resolutions."  I am posting an image with a link to the PDF here in case others are interested in using it.

https://www.scholastic.com/content/dam/parents/migrated-assets/printables/pdfs/printable-100-new-years-reading-resolutions.pdf